Once called the wild poppy, Papaver somniferum is now a domesticated plant that, like tobacco, coca leaves and the original cereal crops, was cultivated by our ancestors almost 5000 years ago. Papaver somniferum seeds are non-toxic, can be pressed to produce oil, can be baked into nutritious muffins and the stems can be used as animal feed. There is little evidence that poppies were used medicinally in ancient cultures, although it is clear that they were known to the Minoan culture of Bronze Age Crete. In 1937, a small statue of a goddess was discovered in Crete, with three vertically sectioned poppy heads braided into her hair to represent the extraction of poppy milk. The goddess had her hands raised, her eyes closed and a beatific smile on her mouth, as if she were stunned. The statue is thought to have been created around 1300-1250 BC and to be a kind of first description of the use of opium, probably during religious rituals.
A gold ring depicting a fertility goddess holding three poppy heads, thought to represent wealth, health and fertility, was also found at Mycenae in the Greek Peloponnese.
Ancient Egyptians are thought to have been introduced to opium around the same time, as evidenced by a grave in the Valley of the Kings. There, among other items intended for the afterlife of the deceased, a small amount of opium was found in a sarcophagus, along with instructions written on papyrus to give opium to crying babies. “Mix a very small amount of opium with fly droppings, squeeze and wait four days. The mixture will take effect immediately,” it reads.
With the rise of the Greek and Roman empires, the new societies led a more patriarchal and military life. Homer’s stories were written sometime between 1100 and 800 BC and both the Iliad and the Odyssey (especially the latter) mention opium, among other things. Homer described Egypt as a land where many drugs were known, most of them poisonous, but some of them, if properly prepared, could be medicinal. In the Odyssey, after the fall of Troy, Helen pours drugs into the wine of her friends to ease their pain and sadness and to make them forget all their misfortune.
Hippocrates, considered by many to be the father of Western medicine, also discovered the healing properties of opium. Twenty-one out of twenty-five cases are said to be for the treatment of gynaecological problems, especially of the uterus.
Later, poppy heads also started to appear on coins. They became a means of payment around 600 BC, and when Alexander the Great later began his march to Asia – the Silk Road had existed for centuries by then – it was he who is said to have brought the poppy seeds to the Levant.
In the 1st century AD, poppies appeared on coins, on jewellery, in art and literature, and in the homes and gardens of Europe and the Middle East. Herbalists of the time had already noted that those who regularly used opium became addicted to it and warned against overuse, describing addicts as unable to open their eyelids and suffering from cold breath. In this case, they had to be forced to stay awake and to expel the contents of their stomach.
Galen, Marcus Aurelius’ physician, prescribed opium, among other drugs, to help the emperor sleep better. When Marcus Aurelius went on a military expedition to the Danube, he had no access to opium for some time and very soon developed symptoms of nervousness, which indicated that he was addicted.
Opium is also a medicine
The history of opium in the East does not begin with the drug, but with the infrastructure that made its spread and use possible. The Chinese Silk Road, both its northern and southern sections and the sea routes to southern India, created a link between the West and the East, and only ceased with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.
Opium was also later fatally linked to Chinese history, but there is no evidence of its use in the Roman Empire, where hemp (canabis sativa) is thought to have been more domesticated. Many things travelled the Silk Road in both directions, probably including poppy seeds. In Persia, which was a mighty kingdom, a mixture called haoma was found in sacred vessels, which was a mixture of papaver somniferum and canabis sativa and some other plants.
The Persian empire then collapsed and the gap was filled by Islam, which under Muhammad united all Arabs in the belief in one God, Allah. The Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid (795-809) founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and invited scholars from all over the world to translate all the knowledge of the world into Arabic.
At the turn of the millennium, the Persian Ibn-Sina, known as Avicenna (980-1034), appeared in Baghdad. It was he who brought together all this medical knowledge and realised that there were fifteen types of pain and that opium was the most suitable treatment.
If we understand why and how we feel pain, it is easier to deal with it. Avicenna distinguished between pain killers (taskin) and anaesthetics (mukhadar) for pain relief, and opium was considered to fall into both categories and was therefore recommended for preparing for amputations as well as for treating gout and insomnia. However, he also warned of the dangers of taking too much opium.
But Avicenna was an interesting person. He liked to dress in brocade and was hard to see without a linen turban on his head and always had leather sandals on his feet. He loved to drink wine and party with concubines and was a general lover of debauchery, but died in 1037 from too much opium. This was a few years after he had accompanied his emir into battle and contracted a serious illness under very suspicious circumstances. He was an addict.
In Western Europe, little was known about opium. Pope Urban’s call for Christianity to conquer Jerusalem sent many crusaders on their way. Some were pilgrims, others soldiers, still others pillagers. The Crusades, which lasted until 1487, drove thousands of people on the road, almost without any medical escort. There were medical schools in Salerno, Montpellier, Padua, Paris and Bologna, from which “medicus” came, but only those with a lot of money could afford their expertise.
That’s why barbers went with the Crusaders as healers, and at the same time, they also shed blood. They did not use any pain killers during the operations. It was only later, after the Crusader kingdoms had already been established in Palestine, that Wiliyam of Tyre, born there, mentioned that the best opium came from Egypt and that the healers called it ‘Theban’.
After that, opium was unheard of in Europe for a long time, until Marco Polo, on his journey through Central Asia, described his encounter with a caravan of a hundred camels, carrying loads of opium, travelling westwards. He also quoted a story he heard from the locals about an old man from the mountain.
In the Persian mountains, an old man from the mountains barricaded a ravine between two mountain passes and turned it into a beautiful garden. He convinced his followers that this was the Garden of Eden, where milk, honey and water flowed, and young beauties of paradise were served. In front of the garden was a fortress where young men were given military training, mainly to assassinate the enemies of the Old Man of the Mountain.
Those who were chosen for this task were allowed to enjoy this garden, before being drugged with a magical potion. When they woke up, they were convinced that they were in the paradise promised by the Koran and that, having successfully completed their bloody task, they would end up here. But when they awoke from their stupor, they were back in the fortress, they were presented with a ceremonial dagger and they set out to fulfil the mission from which they never returned – to kill the enemy.
This legend is actually the story of the suicide assassins of a religious fanatic of the Islamic sect, Hasan-al-Sabah, who had his stronghold at Alamut, 80 kilometres from present-day Tehran. Marco Polo misplaced this fortress somewhere in the Lebanese mountains. The magic potion with which the young men were drugged before being taken to paradise was none other than canabis indica.
The Black Death, or plague, which spread from Central Asia along the Silk Road, killed between 30 and 60% of all Europeans between 1346 and 1353. But opium, one of the first tools doctors used to fight the plague, came to Europe along the same route. The opium-laced poison successfully relieved the four main symptoms of the plague: purulent sores, aching joints, violent coughing and diarrhoea.
All this helped to spark Europeans’ later interest in opium. It was cultivated in gardens and on monastic estates along with other medicinal plants. Remnants have even been found in the garden of London’s main old gaol.
Opium was also used by many famous doctors of the time. Of course, they mixed it with various other ingredients, trying to achieve the best and most effective formulation. The consumption of opium increased steadily in the 16th century, and not only among the privileged classes.
But the flow of opium from the East was intermittent, as the Ottoman Empire now controlled all land routes. Further east, the Indian Moghul Empire was expanding, posing even greater problems for traders on the Silk Road. To meet Europe’s opium needs, traders had to find a new route to the eastern lands, and that route was by sea.
Opium becomes a commodity
In northern Europe, Germanic coastal towns formed the Hanseatic League to ensure the smooth transport of goods across the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. In the eastern Mediterranean, various Italian city republics, notably Venice, had a monopoly on trade with the East. But while other maritime powers such as Spain, England and Holland competed with each other to see which would have a monopoly on the fragrance trade from India and Indonesia, the Portuguese sailed boldly and explored further.
In 1557, under unclear circumstances, the trading post of Macao was established. The establishment was not due to their negotiating skills with the Chinese authorities, but to the embarrassment of the Chinese Ministry of Finance.
In 1552, the Chinese Emperor Jiajing was faced with a complex task. He had obtained 800 virgin suitors and in 1554 urgently needed a larger quantity of aphrodisiac. Doctors gave him a prescription, but it required a larger quantity of ambergris, which was very rare in China. Ambergris is a solid waxy substance of dark grey to almost black colour, produced in the belly of the bowhead whale and used both medicinally and as an additive to various fragrances.
The Portuguese, who had a monopoly on shipping in this part of the world, also had a monopoly on the ambergris trade, which made it easy for them to negotiate a lease of land for a trading post they called Macao. In the following years, the Spanish also took over the Philippines, so that trade and the transport of goods in the Far East were virtually in the hands of the Europeans. Opium was just one of hundreds of different commodities traded.
In the late 15th century, China and Japan were the final destinations for Iberian navigators. China had its own problems at that time. Paper money, introduced by the Ming dynasty, was in decline and silver for coinage was scarce, while the Portuguese and Spanish had considerably more. In South America, the Spanish then began to exploit the Potosi silver mine in Bolivia, and soon half of the world’s annual silver production was coming from there.
As soon as Europe learned that their silver money was worth much more in China than at home, many traders headed for China. It is therefore not surprising that the Jesuits came to China in 1582. One of them, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), settled in Macau, learned Chinese and even dressed in Chinese. Significantly, he left a series of writings about this land, which he considered to be the centre of the world. His writings became compulsory reading for all those who wanted to trade in this part of the world.
Opium was also mentioned as an important medicine in the records at the time. But the Portuguese-Spanish domination was short-lived, as these two countries were no longer able to use the new innovative ways of modern trade.
The mighty trading companies that emerged were a compromise between private commercial business and state interests. The British East India Company (East India Company-EIC) was founded in 1600, and just two years later the Dutch United East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie VOC) was established.
English and Dutch society differed in purpose from the start. The English EIC was a trading company and the Dutch VOC was also a military organisation whose purpose was to break the Spanish-Portuguese monopoly on trade in that part of the world. But the Dutch had a great advantage in the trade, as they controlled the spice-rich islands of Indonesia.
Europeans brought tobacco, which was smoked in earthen pipes, as well as tobacco seedlings, to these places. Java and the Philippines had excellent conditions for growing tobacco. The Chinese upper classes started using opium almost at the same time as tobacco, while the lower classes had not yet been introduced to it.
The cultivation of opium poppies and the method of extracting opium (yapian) were recorded by Ming Dynasty chroniclers in the mid-15th century, but it was not until 1589 that customs duties on opium exports were imposed. At that time, some Dutch settlers in Indonesia began to add a speck of opium and a pinch of arsenic to their tobacco pipes to protect them against malaria and cholera. From this, the locals made a tobacco mixture called madak, which contained opium, crushed roots and cannabis. All this was cooked in boiling water, dried and added to the tobacco. “You light your pipe and put it in your mouth. The smoke comes through it into your mouth and goes down your throat. You get a little dizzy, but you ward off malaria.”
Around 1620, Taiwanese merchants spread madak across China, and hardly anyone knew that opium was also mixed in with the tobacco. It is difficult to estimate how madak then spread through south-eastern China. The Chinese authorities only became aware of the problem a few decades later, when opium was already widespread among the Chinese upper classes and had become as much a part of life as working, eating healthily, drinking refreshments and taking medicine.
By the 1720s, the first public opium smoking houses, no longer equipped with chairs but with couches, had already appeared in Fujian, Xiamen and Taiwan, and were beginning to supplant the traditional Chinese teahouses. In Guangdong, in 1728, they started to produce their own madak and stopped importing it.
Soon, ordinary citizens started to visit the smoking rooms. And just as tea connoisseurs could immediately tell where tea came from, opium connoisseurs now knew whether it came from Aden and Bengal or from Punjab and China, which was of inferior quality and cheaper. As always, luxuries had to be imported. Because of the detrimental effect opium had on the morale of the population, Emperor Yongzheng (1723-1736) banned the import of opium by official proclamation in 1729.
This was the first time in history that China stood up to the brutal, almost barbaric exploitation staged in China by foreign countries, which led to the collapse of the country. Of course, this was not about opium, which was merely a pretext for such action.
But in 1757, an event finally decided the fate of China, India and Britain in this part of the world. At the Battle of Palashi in Bengal, the British destroyed the independent principality of Bengal and secured their dominance over the eastern part of the Indian peninsula. This gave them access to India’s cheapest and best opium. All that was needed was to find a market for it. And that market was China, despite the ban on opium imports.
Control over the Indian peninsula was crucial for Britain, as the Turkish Empire had controlled trade routes from the Balkans to the Bay of Bengal since the 14th century. The French traveller Pierre Belon reported seeing several caravans of fifty camels, loaded with bales of opium, bound for Istanbul on a visit to Asia Minor.
The free availability of locally produced opium meant that in the Turkish Empire, opium was no longer just a luxury for the upper classes. Opium was also widely used in the Moghul Empire, which was established in India in 1526. Opium, dissolved in wine or steeped in alcohol, was consumed at court parties by both men and women.
The Moghul ruler Jahangir even had two personal servants, one in charge of wine and the other only in charge of opium. He was also the one who granted the British East India Company (EIC) the right to trade in opium in 1617 under the general trading concessions. He died in 1627 almost insane from years of opium consumption.
Laudanum, the cure for all ills
But the West has been slow to get used to opium. In the 17th century, London was an important intellectual centre, and its medical profession was divided between the ancient Roman physician Galen, who treated mainly with herbs, and Paracelsus, who advocated more alchemical and other special methods of treatment.
It was an era when people began to question some of the dogmas of the past, and the Royal Society of London was founded, bringing together the best minds of the time. All the innovations of the world came there, from potatoes, rice, corn and silk to opium.
The renowned physician Sydenham recommended opium for the treatment of many ailments: ‘Of all the remedies which God has ordained for man to cure him of his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium’. His successful prescription for pain thus included sherry wine, opium, saffron, cinnamon and cloves. He mixed it all, soaked it for two weeks and finally filtered it.
His prescription was for immediate effect, and this was the fundamental difference between the use of opium in the West and the East. The West was always looking for the quickest way – and drinking a dose of opium was the quick way – while the biggest opium users in the East, the Chinese, smoked opium slowly or used pills that only took effect after a while.
Barely a year after Sydenham published his prescription for laudanum, Friedrich Jacob Merck, a Bavarian pharmacist from Darmstadt, opened a pharmacy, sold laudanum and laid the foundations for the pharmaceutical giant that still exists today. Laudanum became so popular that it made its way into literature. Mary Shelley writes about it in her book Frankenstein, Bram Stoker mentions it in Dracula and it is also mentioned in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
But no sooner had laudanum begun its triumphant journey across Europe and America than Jacob Le Mort, a chemist from Leiden, produced his own version of laudanum. This was milder and contained honey, liqueur, aniseed, camphor and potassium carbonate in addition to opium. The new laudanum quickly became a must-have in the family pharmacy, relieving coughs, asthma and diarrhoea, and soothing children who were teething. Opium and its derivatives thus became a widely accepted medicine, cheap and freely available in all major towns.
The second half of the 17th century saw important changes in the world. The power of the Ottoman and Moghul empires was declining, exhausted by numerous wars, but trade with the Balkans and Turkey increased. Although Egyptian Theban opium was still the best quality, Europe was getting most of its opium from Turkey. This opium was heavy, fragrant, bitter and reddish-brown in colour.
Turkish opium, as well as other innovations from the Orient such as tea and coffee from Yemen, meant a new way of life for many. The use of opium became more sophisticated and the intellectual life gained in importance. In 1753, the Swedish botanist Karel Linaeus classified the opium poppy as Papaver somniferum and counted as many as 32 000 seeds in a single poppy head.
By the 18th century, individuals were beginning to emerge who thought differently about opium than they had done before. They pointed to the long-term abuse of opiates, but without condemnation, convinced of their fundamentally positive action. Even America, after gaining independence, could not resist the veritable flood of painkillers, digestive aids and sedatives that flooded American newspaper advertisements from the former colonial capital of London. Thus wrote one European visitor to the American East Coast: “On Nantucket Island, the Asian custom of taking opium in the morning has been popular for years. It is so ingrained that the inhabitants no longer know how to survive without it.”
Even without opium, Americans were known as users of various stimulants. Caribbean rum was particularly popular, but they also liked to drink home-brewed beer and cider, and produced large quantities of whisky.
The new age of empiricism and scientific thought also saw the emergence of an important literary movement, Romanticism. It was nostalgic, rebellious, intellectual and daring, a kind of reaction to the endless hardships of war. Its typical English exponents were Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), both opium addicts.
Laudanum was used in Britain at the time in untold quantities, and the biggest users were the poorest classes in the industrial areas of England. In Manchester, where the textile industry dominated, on Saturday afternoons, when the work in the factories finished, the chemists would have the sachets containing the pills ready to go. Laudanum was cheaper than wine, could be used by the whole family, and no one was socially stigmatised because of it, but it was intoxicating and helped to forget worries and hard lives.
But for Romantic poets like De Quincey and Coleridge, laudanum had a different meaning. Coleridge was convinced that he was so productive and that he wrote his best poems precisely because of his constant consumption of laudanum. De Quincey, who initially took opium because of neuralgia, wrote a famous book in 1821, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in which he claimed to have taken laudanum in very large quantities. He described the visions he experienced while doing so in the following words:
“The sense of space and time has been profoundly changed. Buildings, landscapes and everything else appeared in proportions that the eye could not accept. Space was inflated and magnified to an unbearable infinity.”
The deaths of both Coleridge and De Quincey mirrored their lives. The former died as an addict in his doctor’s house, the latter was haunted by nightmares, litigation and indebtedness until the end.
In 1804, while both English poets were still alive, a German pharmacist, Wilhelm Sertürner, isolated the active constituents of opium from the milk of the opium plant, producing a crystalline alkaloid substance he called morphine. He tested it on himself and his colleagues and they all nearly died from overdose.
This ushered in a new era in drug production and use. Morphine was a new, pure chemical product that worked instantly and seemed to have no side effects. People who had previously been shrunken by pain would get up and stagger out of the doctor’s surgery after taking morphine. Sertürner had thus unwittingly unleashed another monster into the world. On the other side of the world, in China, Britain has created yet another monster.
Opium Wars
Once the British had also established a foothold in the Bay of Bengal, the British East India Company (EIC) transformed itself from a purely trading company into an extremely powerful bureaucratic and military force, controlling millions of people. In those days, for one reason or another, the British were quite fond of drinking tea, which at that time was still largely imported from China. There was not a shop in Britain that did not stock a variety of teas and not a family that did not drink them.
Britain imported tea in extremely large quantities and had to pay Chinese producers for it, and cash transactions were not widespread even in Britain. The Chinese, of course, did not care to buy British products because they had nothing to do with them. So how to solve this payment conundrum?
Britain had something in the Bay of Bengal that would be worth selling in China. This was the large quantities of quality opium produced in Patna, Benares, Behar and Malwa. The Chinese needed large quantities of opium and the easiest way to sell it to them would have been in exchange for tea. This is how the British conceived of the natural trade. The only problem was that opium had been banned in China since the late 18th century. This prohibition was not effective, but it did mean that the EIC could not officially bring Bengali opium to Canton in ships under its flag.
But the British, in their arrogance, simply broke Chinese rules. They continued to sail shamelessly to Canton in opium-laden ships, or they transhipped their cargo near Canton to local Chinese merchant ships controlled by Chinese secret societies or triads.
The weak Chinese government was unable to resist the powerful Chinese merchants in Canton, for whom selling opium to their own citizens was a business like any other. This business soon accounted for a large part of the British colonial empire’s revenue. The British thus financed their thirst for tea in an inventive way, and ever larger areas of Bengal were now planted with poppies instead of indigo and sugar.
So opium came to Canton in large quantities and the profits were more than excellent. The Americans caught wind of this and soon American ships full of Turkish opium bought in Smyrna (Izmir) began to dock in Canton. The English did not like the competition, but because they were still by far the biggest opium dealer, they relented. Soon there were around 12 million opium addicts in southern China alone.
The Chinese have also tried to prevent the opium trade by violent means, seizing ships and expelling foreign traders. This resulted in two Opium Wars (1839 and 1856), after which a defeated China had to cede Hong Kong and its nearby islands to the British, allow foreigners to trade freely in several coastal cities, including Canton and Shanghai, grant extraterritorial status to foreign enclaves on its territory and legalise the opium trade. In the 1890s, domestic opium production was legalised and poppy fields spread throughout southern China. Soon, almost a quarter of the Chinese population was dependent on opiates.
Americans’ contact with opiates was brief and dramatic. There is no information on how the settlers who penetrated into the interior of the North American continent relieved their pain and ailments along the way, but it is likely that they used home-grown and tried and tested herbal remedies.
Opiates came to the East Coast of America from England and some doctors recommended the free use of opium, in Connecticut as early as 1812 during a smallpox outbreak. Inland, however, opium was not available. The invention of morphine in the form of powder, extracted from the dried sap of immature poppy heads, was such a commercial success that it made a splash on the shores of America. But it was not until the invention of the hypodermic medical needle that effective use was possible.
Medical needles were known to Roman Galen and Da Vinci, who used them to inject wax into the veins of corpses. As late as 1820, doctors injected morphine into patients by cutting into the skin, lifting it up a little and then injecting morphine into the opening. It was not until the middle of the century that real hollow medical needles appeared, and at that time doctors were convinced that this way of injecting morphine was not addictive. They soon realised their error, as well as that unsterilised needles were a major problem, as they often inflamed the needle sites.
The reality of the American Civil War (1861-1865) was the extremely high number of wounded soldiers. They were given powdered morphine to rub into their wounds. Morphine was certainly common among soldiers, and one battlefield reporter described a doctor on horseback riding from soldier to soldier with a fistful of morphine, and the soldiers licking the morphine right out of his open hand.
The entire Unionist army had only a few hundred needles to inject morphine, the Confederacy had almost none. After the end of the Civil War, America was full of crippled and ill-treated military veterans with only one thing on their minds; how to get morphine to relieve their excruciating pain.
The word “kuli” in Chinese means “strong power”, a person who is willing to do hard physical work. After the Second Opium War, such workers came by boat from China to earn money, landing in San Francisco, which the Chinese called Dai Fou. It was here that the first Chinatown in America was established as early as 1850.
Soon, opium dens and public houses began to open, where sailors and the unemployed were happy to go. In 1867, the Pacific Railway Company in California hired 12,000 Chinese workers to build a railway to the interior of the country, and opium began to spread there. Opium dens soon began to appear along the railway lines. Smoking a pipe of opium cost 20 cents, and for one dollar one could smoke as much as one could bear before falling into a drugged sleep.
However, in 1897, the State of California banned Chinese immigration due to numerous complaints from the white population, but the ban was overturned by the US Supreme Court. Soon opium and morphine were spreading unstoppably throughout the country.
In 1883, a report by a well-known American physician caused a storm, claiming that most doctors were themselves morphine addicts and that 30% of them were addicts. Amidst debate about whether this was true, the first sanatorium in America opened its doors in Illinois, where morphine addicts were given morphine withdrawal injections for $160 a day. They contained strychnine, boric acid and the alkaloid atropine. The sanatorium was a real success story.
Pharmaceutical giants and the mafia
A new chapter in the development of opiates was opened in Germany in 1897 by Bayer. There, Arthur Eichengrün – although opinions differ as to the real originator of heroin – was employed in the development department and synthesised heroin from morphine. Bayer marketed heroin as a cough suppressant and morphine substitute until 1910, when it was discovered that it was rapidly metabolised into morphine.
Eichengrün later set up his own business, but because he was of Jewish descent, the Nazis confiscated it and sent him to a concentration camp. From there, he wrote to Bayer, asking for help and giving expert advice. Of course, Bayer did nothing for him, but he survived the war and died in 1949, forgotten.
Heroin has been a huge success for Bayer in both Europe and America. Tuberculosis patients and those suffering from advanced lung disease were not cured by heroin, but their painful symptoms were significantly reduced. They felt well again. But heroin turns into morphine almost immediately in the body, whether the user sniffs it, smokes it or injects it.
In the beginning, heroin was cheap and could be ordered by mail order. But as early as 1901, the first warnings of heroin addiction began to appear. This was the beginning of the realisation of the worst fears of the medical profession. But too late. World developments pushed heroin to the very forefront of medical science, in a way that corresponded to the development of a new type of organised crime.
Of all the Italian criminal organisations involved in the heroin business, the most famous was the New York-based Cosa Nostra, which controlled 90% of heroin sales in America and was made up of five families in 1931; Bonnano, Colombino, Gambini, Genovese and Lucchese. All of them were of Sicilian origin and operated as such.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the first Mafia groups began to appear in Sicily. With the collapse of feudalism, land became available to large and small landowners. To keep their properties safe from attack by local robber gangs, they hired small groups of determined men, skilled in the use of weapons, to provide them with protection in return for a fee. These mafia groups therefore played a positive role in the beginning.
Sicily’s role as a backward country changed when, towards the end of the 18th century, citrus fruits were discovered to be an excellent remedy for scurvy – a perennial problem for sailors at sea. The export of citrus fruits, now coveted by the whole world and falling into the hands of the Mafia, increased its power immeasurably. Citrus fruits were also exported to America via the port of New York, and some Mafia families moved there.
As the citrus business began to weaken, the Cosa Nostra had a new star moment. The introduction of Prohibition, or the ban on the production and sale of alcoholic beverages, was grist for its mill. Alcohol provided it with a higher income than the sale of citrus fruits and even heroin.
But a few years later, the prohibition of alcoholic beverages was lifted and the mafia once again found a solution in heroin. Here the profits were even higher, almost astronomical. Heroin came from China and, with the help of the Corsican mafia, from Marseille.
World War II
Opiates also played an important role in both World Wars. Britain entered the First World War completely unprepared, having to import even simple disinfectants for minor wounds from America. In the first major battle of the Marne, from 6 to 12 September 1914, even the primitive system of transporting the wounded from the battlefield to a nearby town by horse or mule-drawn carts failed.
Only a small amount of Turkish opium was available for pain relief, and Chinese and Indian opium were too low-quality to be turned into morphine. There were no field doctors, and the soldiers were forbidden to help the wounded, but had to go on fighting. The opium supply only improved in 1917, when the first shipments started arriving from Iran, although no one really knew where the opium came from.
One of the biggest differences in medical care between World War I and World War II was the first truly successful medical care on the battlefield. American medical personnel were very well equipped. The standard equipment of an American battlefield medic included sufficient disposable morphine injections, iodine-soaked pads, ammonia for inhalation, bandages, plasters, safety pins, tourniquets, other antiseptics and bleeding stoppers. Contrary to popular belief, soldiers did not have morphine unless they were in parachute units, and even then they were only given one injection.
Britain also remembered the lessons of the First World War and stocked up on an adequate supply of morphine in time. Medical advances were already incredible then. Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in 1928, but his discovery was forgotten for a decade and mass production only started in the middle of World War II.
Sulfanilamide, patented in Austria in World War I but not used, can now be poured into wounds and immediately prevent infection. Penicillin, sulfa-powder and opium were the most common agents used on the battlefield during World War II.
The period between the two world wars was a golden age for pharmaceuticals in Germany. In 1926, the Germans were the number one producer of morphine in Europe and the world’s largest producer of heroin. The pharmaceutical giant Merck was the world’s largest producer of both opiates and cocaine, which was first isolated in 1862. Cocaine was a stimulant drug made from coca leaves from South America.
The Nazi regime also had a special expert group within the police to control the use of opium and cocaine, and ruthlessly suppressed the use of opium except for medical purposes. By contrast, the regime looked very favourably on the use of various synthetic drugs. Thus IG Farben developed the synthetic drug benzedrine, which was also used by a number of athletes during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
In 1937, even more potent, aggressive and fatigue-inducing methamphetamine pills appeared on the market. Pervitin became a compulsory pill for German soldiers on all the battlefields of World War II. German soldiers could fight for days without sleep under the influence of meth, while their opponents’ eyes would close after the first day without sleep.
The British RAF tested the effects of various stimulants on its pilots on their way to bomb German cities. Thus, in the second half of 1944, all British pilots were also given two 5-milligram tablets of benzedrine.
Golden Triangle
The Vietnam War was America’s longest war, lasting from 1 November 1955 until the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. Movies and the media have become quite used to the idea of the American soldier as a junkie, addicted to heroin and marijuana. This impression was created by a 1971 report to the US Congress on the number of US soldiers addicted to drugs. The report claimed that at least 15% of the soldiers were already addicts, most of them to heroin.
This report so enraged President Nixon that he called a press conference and pledged to do whatever it took, whatever the cost, to prevent drug trafficking and thus preserve the health of US troops. No mention was made, however, of the fact that the US had played a dishonourable role in the creation of the world’s largest heroin pool, now called the Golden Triangle, which comprised the triangular territory between Laos, Burma and Thailand.
Between 1968 and 1969, 1 000 tonnes of raw opium were produced here each year, refined into morphine in Laos and immediately exported to Europe or via Hong Kong to America. The heroin produced in this way was called No 3 and was a lumpy thing with a lower heroin content, like a sugar cube in appearance, and was intended to be smoked.
Heroin No. 4 was already a high-quality powder, produced from opium, often sourced in Afghanistan, which could be converted into a solution and injected.
In the 1970s, even Chinese heroin chefs from Hong Kong came to the Golden Triangle to bring the quality of No 3 heroin closer to that of heroin from Afghanistan through a special process. This heroin was then deliberately shipped to South Vietnam and sold to US soldiers. Here, packaged in small bottles that sold for three dollars, it became extremely popular.
The CIA was looking for a suitable location, or rather a hub, from which to plan its operations throughout South-East Asia. And it chose Laos, where Burma and Thailand refined their opium into morphine. Air America had been providing transport for the CIA for 19 years as part of its covert operations, and there are many suspicions that during those years it also transported heroin and morphine from Laos, which the CIA then sold and used the proceeds to finance its covert operations. The CIA has denied this vehemently, but the fact is that it was present there and that it used Air America as a front for its work.
The heroin trade has become extremely profitable, and Frank Lukas, an African-American from North Carolina, has realised this. The heroin market in New York was then dominated by the Italian mafia, especially the Lucchese family of Harlem. But Frank Lukas had his own ambitions. He could not compete with the Italian mafia, so he went to Bangkok and met an ex-American orderly who owned a nightclub and was well connected with the American military.
It was in this bar that Lukas met Luchau Rubiwat, a Thai-Chinese who had business contacts with heroin dealers in the Golden Triangle. This allowed Lukas to buy heroin directly without intermediaries, thus avoiding the Italian mafia. He paid US soldiers returning home to America, usually via Fort Bragg in North Carolina, to smuggle heroin into the US for him.
But there were other routes for transport; heroin was also hidden in the coffins of dead American soldiers being sent home. Lukas became a multi-millionaire.
The US administration set up special clinics to test US soldiers for heroin addiction before allowing them to return to America. Almost all those who became addicted while serving in Vietnam were weaned off heroin almost immediately, just so they could go home.
But the problem was elsewhere, and the most telling was a young American soldier who finished university and was immediately sent to Vietnam, where he served for three years. When he came home, he realised that he could dismantle and reassemble an automatic rifle blindfolded, but now he did not know what he was supposed to do in civilian life. “When I returned home, I had the strange feeling that I was much older than my father, who was only 50 years old.”
Vietnam took an entire generation of young people from America and trained them only for war. It was only when he returned home that a young man turned to heroin. And he was not the only one.
A lifetime of pleasure
“I owe him the most beautiful hours”, wrote Jean Cocteau, who became an opium addict in 1904 after suffering from neuralgic pain for twenty consecutive days. “It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless, and our country had nothing to offer but a rainy afternoon,” he wrote in his memoirs of an addict.
Cocteau, a Parisian pleasure seeker, immediately fell into the “abyss of heavenly pleasure”. He took opium for 25 years, then decided to wean himself off it and wrote his best works in 1929, when he was going through his most difficult moments. Attractive and charismatic as he was, he was a true publicity stunt for addiction and recovery.
He called what he was experiencing a new understanding of what it means to be an addict, with an accompanying sense of isolation and, ultimately, of salvation. “Everything one does in life, even love, happens on a fast train heading towards death. When you smoke opium, it’s like getting off that train, but it’s still moving. Then you are interested in something other than life or death.”
Cocteau’s feelings about the opium he ate, smoked and drank are a model of the European upper-middle-class addict. Costeau was writing at a time when the new psychoactive drugs were being used and he himself was still drinking or smoking opiates in the old way. He despised the morphinists and took opium regularly in the morning, afternoon and evening. Eventually he realised that he had to stop taking it and he described his experience of doing so. He distinguished between addiction as a noble quest for something new and the reality of street vending.
Although World War II interrupted the regular supply of heroin to America, after the war ended in the late 1940s, a heroin epidemic in the slums of Chicago showed that international heroin dealers had found new routes to America by selling daily doses for little money. By the 1960s, marijuana had become a fashionable drug, taken by many for “recreation”.
But Cocteau’s experience of addiction was now taken up in America by the beat poets, who took whatever came to hand and emptied their pockets. They were too busy dreaming of personal and sexual freedom and horrified by the misfortunes that a repressive capitalist society was supposedly inflicting on them. William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were the main harbingers of the Beat Generation.
Burroughs became a convicted drug user at a young age, when he was denied a commission in the Navy during World War II, and became a drug dealer in New York in 1950. At the time, he wrote: “Drugs are not a way of increasing pleasure like alcohol or weed. It is a way of life.”
His novels Junkie and Naked Lunch were banned in America, not so much for writing about drugs, but for their descriptions of sodomy and paedophilia. He was also hailed as a genius by his circles after he shot his wife in a state of narcotic delirium. His descriptions of morphine use are familiar to any addict today. His legacy to the new creative generation coming to the fore was in stark contrast to his traditional American youthful upbringing and Harvard education, something those who read his books could not even hope for.
In later editions of his works, he wrote that the only successful way to recover from heroin, which he himself had tried, was apomorphine. “I have tried everything. Short drug withdrawal, cortisone, antihistamine, tranquillisers, sleeping pills, Tolserol, reserpine. None of these worked and I went back to drugs at the first opportunity.”
Apomorphine was, of course, nothing new and can be found in lotus flowers and white water lilies. It was used ritually by the Maya people of Central America as a hallucinogenic drug and aphrodisiac, and can be synthesised from morphine, as the Germans discovered in 1845. It was used to treat Parkison’s disease, but was later recognised as a dangerous drug.
It is therefore inevitable that humanity will continue to be associated with drugs, whether they are used in wars and surgery, or to relieve chronic pain and treat disease. We may just use drugs in different forms in the future. Obviously, we humans will always be looking for the right key to lock our bodies, our hearts and our minds.
